Opinion

At Sea over Mountbatten’s Legacy
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA

When his plane touched down at Delhi’s Palam airfield in March 1947, the dashing naval officer was three months shy of his 47th birthday. The Rear Admiral had been on track to command the First Cruiser Squadron in April but His Majesty’s Government (HMG) had intervened. Despite Mountbatten’s love for the sea, he was given plenipotentiary powers to extricate Britain from India by June 1948.
Within five months of stepping on Indian soil, Lord Mountbatten would cede power not to one but to two dominions, thereby unleashing the great tragedy known as Partition. Its sixtieth anniversary has renewed interest in “Dickie.” He is the primary figure not only in Stanley Wolpert’s “Shameful Flight” that came out last year (reviewed in last Sunday’s paper, “Mountbatten’s Bloodied Sunset”), but also in a trio of books by Britons that have come out this year: Yasmin Khan’s “The Great Partition,” Alex von Tunzelmann’s “Indian Summer” and Pamela Mountbatten’s “India Remembered.”
These supplement books about Mountbatten that have come out in prior years, such as H. V. Hudson’s “The Great Divide”, Alan Campbell-Johnson’s “Mission with Mountbatten” and Philip Ziegler’s “Mountbatten.” Dickie also figured prominently in a recent BBC documentary.
There are a few common themes in these portrayals of the last Englishman to rule India but they are easily outnumbered by the divergent themes. All observers agree that he was conceited, not exactly brilliant, one who used military uniforms to gain prominence at state functions and a man who did not let jealously disrupt his marriage.
On his death, The New York Times quoted him, “I am the most conceited man I have ever known.” When he was promoted to an Admiral’s rank at age 41, he delighted in the knowledge that he had attained flag-officer status two years ahead of Horatio Nelson, England’s towering hero of the Battle of Trafalgar. Later in life, he would top that off by saying, “It is a curious thing, but I have been right in everything I had done and said. in my life.”
His recollection of historical events often differed from that of others who had been present at the same time so much so that an army colleague famously told him, “Dickie, you’re so crooked that if you swallowed a nail u’d shit a corkscrew!”
Alas, the same crookedness was also evident in weightier matters. Of course, people who worked with him (Hudson or Campbell-Johnson) or are his relatives (Mountbatten, his daughter), give him the benefit of the doubt but others raise nettlesome questions. Nine of these are noteworthy.
Three questions challenge HMG’s wisdom in selecting him to be the last Viceroy. Why was a land command given to a sailor? Why was a man with little political experience and even less knowledge of India sent there? And, even if the heavens had decreed that Mountbatten was the chosen man for the moment, why was he shielded from Cabinet oversight?
Six questions challenge Mountbatten’s decisions. Firstly, did he have the right approach for drawing the boundaries of India and Pakistan? The Earl of Burma lived long enough to sense that history would not judge him kindly. In the early seventies, he told an interviewer, “I’ll tell you something ghastly. The reasons behind [Radcliffe’s] award weren’t very deep-seated at all. I am quite certain they were based on some rule of thumb about the proportion of population [belonging to the two religions].” But Radcliffe could not have come up with “deeper” reasons for drawing his lines, since he had been instructed to observe religious demographics.
Second, why was Partition rushed to the point of ridicule, with a vice regal declaration in June that India and Pakistan would become independent with unspecified boundaries in August? Perhaps he was not really interested in getting to know the key Indian personalities, let alone bond with them, and was desperate for a naval command. Mountbatten never understood the larger cultural and political context that had framed the history of the sub-continent for millennia. His scheme of Partition, with precious little homework behind it, accentuated the religious divisions that it was supposed to heal.
Third, why did he take the governor general’s position in New Delhi (after he had not been offered the position in Karachi) even though he knew it was morally wrong? Perhaps it was to spite Jinnah, with whom he never struck rapport and whom, in his later years, he referred to as a psychopath.
Fourth, why did he want to insert the Union Jack in the upper land-hand corner of the Indian flag? Perhaps he saw a parallel between India and Australia and Canada that had eluded others.
Fifth, why did Pakistan not get its fair share of assets, even though he was the governor general of India? Perhaps he was not as unbiased as he professed to be. Maybe there really was a political love triangle between him, his wife and Panditji.
And sixth, why did he decide to send British troops home and hand-over peacekeeping functions to the incipient armed forces of the two dominions? Perhaps his loyalty to the British Crown trumped his concern for the 400 million who lived in India and who, along with their parents, grand parents and great-great parents, had suffered the indignation of being colonized and ruled by the White Mughals for the past 150 years.
After serving as Governor General of India, Mountbatten returned to Britain in June 1948 and resumed service in the Royal Navy in 1953, the year of his cousin Elizabeth’s coronation. He eventually became first Sea Lord, a position held by his father 40 years earlier, and retired as the Chief of Defense Staff. In the twilight of his years, he said, “Whoever would want to murder an old man like me?”
Well, he was wrong at least that one time. On August 27, 1979, the IRA blew up his boat. He had been on summer holiday at his old, rambling castle in the Republic of Ireland. Mountbatten had never taken part in the dispute over the control of Ulster but symbolized the Crown. Fate had decreed that the man who had survived communal hatred thousands of miles from home would succumb to it close to home.
His funeral services took place on September 5, 1979 at Westminster Abbey. In pomp and circumstance, they equaled those given to England’s biggest war hero, the Duke of Wellington. The Archbishop of Canterbury praised the earl for being “so rare a person.” He was buried at his home facing the sea. And to this day, that is where his legacy has been. At sea.

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